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Former F1 driver Alessandro Nannini did not let tragic helicopter crash ruin his life

Nannini's right arm was severed by chopper blades

March 9, 2016

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Forget for a moment the traditional on-track stats that are used to define a race driver’s career. Former Formula One driver Alessandro Nannini’s favorite statistic is one that he lives with every day.

Nannini won just one Formula One Grand Prix in his F1 career that spanned from 1986 to 1990. Many thought he was destined to be a Ferrari driver and maybe even a world champion, before fate intervened in the form of a dramatic helicopter crash that changed everything.

“I’ve seen the facts,” Nannini says. “Ninety-five percent of people involved in incidents similar to mine die. That’s why every day I wake up and I say to myself, ‘Thank God! Life is beautiful!’”

He was Italy’s most promising driving talent until Oct. 12, 1990, when his helicopter pilot attempted to land in a muddy field close to Nannini’s home in Italy. The chopper came down tail first, dug into the mud and flipped onto its roof, rotors whirring. Nannini stuck his hands over his head for protection, and as the canopy collapsed, his right arm was severed by the rotors.

Nannini remembers wondering how he was ever going to go sailing again—a great passion of his—and then he remembers little else, until he woke up in hospital several days later with a re-attached arm.

Alessandro Nannini in his cafe and bakery in Italy, enjoying some of his favorite things.

Today, Nannini, 56, looks after family business concerns in Siena, Tuscany. The Nannini bakery and café business was founded by his grandfather, and their ornate shops are a familiar sight.

He’s still a heavy smoker (“the worst part of my rehabilitation was learning how to smoke with my left hand”) and still enjoys fine wine, food and women: everything that Italy does best.

The accident also derailed any chance that Nannini would be able to pursue a Ferrari contract for 1991.

During the negotiations between Nannini and Ferrari in 1990, Frenchman Jean Alesi was bursting onto the scene with some great drives such as the famous Phoenix Grand Prix, when he held off Ayrton Senna for most of the race. With the French market being particularly important to Ferrari, the Scuderia wanted to get Alesi into one of their cars, if possible.

Alesi’s success changed Ferrari’s plans for Nannini. The Ferrari contract floated to Nannini offered him a chance him to drive for any Ferrari-engined team (including Minardi, with which he had made his debut in 1986). It was a classic case of Ferrari hedging its bets, so Nannini tore up his contract and opted to stay at Benetton: the team that had given him his first (and only) Grand Prix win.

That win came at the controversial 1989 Japanese Grand Prix, where Alain Prost and Senna collided at the chicane in Suzuka. Following their tangle, Senna extricated himself, came into the pits for fresh rubber and then started hunting down the race leader, Nannini.

Nannini celebrates a victory on the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix podium. It would be his only F1 win. Photo by Getty Images

There was nothing the Italian could do about Senna’s McLaren-Honda on new tires, and Nannini finished second. But the race result was reversed a few hours later in Nannini’s favor when the stewards disqualified Senna for having received assistance to get back on track.

That’s not the way he wanted to win it.

“I’m still annoyed about that now,” says Nannini. “As far as I knew, I had a big lead: Nobody actually told me that Senna had changed tires and was catching me at the rate of five seconds per lap. I was deliberately lapping two or three seconds off the pace because I thought there was no threat. When I saw Senna in my mirrors, I was shocked. Had I known he was there, I could have lapped a bit quicker and kept him behind me. So I won from a disqualification unnecessarily when I could have beaten him on the track. I was much more proud of my second place in Adelaide, which was the following Grand Prix.”

That race in Australia was held in torrential rain, to the extent that there were at least two drivers who didn’t want to start, despite pressure from race organizers who were conscious of their live TV commitments. “They told us just to get in and drive because we were paid to die, as well, if necessary. Some people were shocked, but I didn’t have a problem with that,” recalls Nannini. “In fact, I agreed. I got in and drove as hard as I could.” It was like something out of a movie.

The podiums kept coming right up until his final Formula One race, the 1990 Spanish Grand Prix, where he finished third. Then came the helicopter crash a week later, about which Nannini philosophically suggests: “Might just be the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve had so many friends die in racing accidents: What if it was going to be my turn next? I prefer to think about what I have rather than what I didn’t have. Maybe I could have been world champion one day if things had worked out differently.”

Nannini did test Formula One cars again, but by then the moment had passed and he was busy in DTM—Germany’s touring car championship—helped by an Alfa 155 with a specially adapted semi-automatic gearshift.

Nannini and Alfa had a great chance of winning the DTM title in 1994. “Can you imagine what it would have been like if us spaghetti-eaters had socked it to the Germans on their home territory?” he says. “It would have been like them coming over to us and beating up the Pope.”

But it didn’t happen because Nannini was taken out of the race and the championship at the hairpin in Singen by Roland Asch. That move gave Asch’s Mercedes teammate the championship.

Nannini was livid. He took the Alfa back to the pits, took on fresh tires and pursued Asch just as Senna had pursued Nannini himself in Japan five years earlier. When he found his target, he waited until the same hairpin and then punted Asch off so hard that the Alfa burst into flames.

“I’m probably not as excitable now as I was back then,” he says, despite drinking what is probably his 15th espresso of the day. “But I still don’t give a shit about what anybody else thinks.”